When I woke up, Alice was gone. Left early in order to make it back before her father woke up. I was still a little surprised that she had come over in the first place. Same morning routine followed by going outside. Before running into the kids, I saw Mrs. Spooner in her front yard. At first, I thought she was just gardening like before, and I walked up to her. She had been crying. She tried to fake like she hadn’t, but before she could get very far into her explanations, I hugged her. We hugged like that for a while, and we both cried. I think it was at that point that I realized that my family wasn’t coming back. Deep down, I had known it all along, but I never had wanted to admit it to myself. A week had gone by since they had disappeared. A week since the bloody, frantic run across the city back to my home to find nothing but an empty garage and empty beds. Mrs. Spooner and I stayed like that for a while before she eventually pulled herself together and gave me the standard “everything is going to be all right.”
I tried calling my family again with no luck. Then it was on to the streets again. Alice wasn’t with the group of kids that morning. I fought back the urge to go to her house to look for her. I didn’t want her to get in trouble. I ended up hanging out with the teenage boys more than the little kids. I remember looking at the kid who had lashed out yesterday and seeing something in his eyes that I connected with. He knew they were gone too. We talked some about it. Most of the older kids were starting to wonder what was going to happen now. Jeremy, a lanky kid who read a lot of manga, talked on and on about it being the end of the world and the potential causes. One kid said that his parents thought it was the Rapture and that this was the end times. Neither of them had very good things to say about what was going to happen next. We were pretty downtrodden by the time we split up for lunch.
I went back to my house to get some food and decided that I would bring some over to Alice’s house. When I got there, Alice’s father answered the door. He said “thank you” for the food but that Alice wasn’t allowed to come out and play today. I suppose he found out about Alice sneaking out. The rest of the afternoon was soccer-filled until night time. A lot of the nights were spent outside in the streets. Everyone would start gathering around a central fire and a lot of times we would all cook stuff, BBQ for the first several days, while people used up the meat they had in their refrigerators and freezers. That trailed off eventually, but we still all gathered around the fire. I finally saw Alice then. She looked liked she had been crying a lot. Her dad had found out about her sneaking out and had forced her to stay in her room all day.
I told her I was going to stay over at her place that night if her dad would let me. She brightened up a lot after that. Her dad eventually agreed to it, especially after I got Mr. Homitzer involved. He said it was better that I stay in a house with adults for the time being. The President’s speech had taken on a new edge that night. He said that while the search to find the missing people was still important, the new priority was to rebuild the country, which was still in a state of disaster. Looking around the bonfire that night, I could see it on a lot of faces. The same look I saw on Mrs. Spooner’s face and my own face. That look that showed that we knew that the missing people weren’t coming back. Alice didn’t have that look, and I decided not to share it with her–better for her to still have hope.